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Bipartisan voting reform effort comes to an end in Florida Senate committee

Bipartisan voting reform effort comes to an end in Florida Senate committee

Senate Ethics and Elections Committee Chairman Jack Latvala hoped for a unanimous thumbs-up on a measure designed to fix the election woes highlighted by long lines at voting sites last November.

Instead the St. Petersburg Republican stormed out of the committee meeting room Monday after all Democrats – including Vice Chairwoman Eleanor Sobel of Hollywood – voted “no.”

Democrats said their objections to the bill shouldn’t come as a surprise. They filed numerous amendments late last week and held a press conference two weeks ago highlighting their wish-list for the bill (SB 600).

The House passed its version of the bill (HB 7013) on the first day of the legislative session, with just one Republican voting against the measure. Like the House plan, the Senate bill allows elections supervisors to choose from eight to 14 days of early voting and offer early voting from eight to 12 hours each day. The Senate bill also expands the types of early voting sites that can be used.

But Senate Democrats said the early voting changes proposed by this year’s bill don’t go far enough to undo the damage created by a 2011 elections package (HB 1355) that shrank the number of early voting days from 14 to 8 and imposed new requirements along with stiff penalties for third-party registration groups. A federal court overturned the third-party voter registration part of that law, but the rest remained intact.

Republican consultants and former GOP officials said that bill, signed into law by Gov. Rick Scott, was designed to suppress Democratic turnout in reaction to the 2008 election when minorities helped President Obama’s victory in Florida.

This year’s measure does not have a provision that Democrats want, a requirement that supervisors offer early voting on the Sunday before the election, a “Souls to the Polls” day that many national organizers wanted set aside to enable minority voters to cast ballots after church.

Sen. Jeff Clemens, D-Lake Worth, also wanted to do away with a new provision in the law requiring individuals who move from one county to another to cast provisional ballots if they don’t update their address before election day.

Other Democratic-backed amendments would have required at least one early voting site for every 47,000 residents, required supervisors to open an additional early voting site near one that has a wait time of more than an hour and required all counties to have the full 14 days of early voting.

All of the Democrats’ amendments either failed or were withdrawn, as Latvala grew increasingly impatient.

Latvala said he would consider some of their changes at another time “in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation on this committee if we can get to that point on this bill.”

But they did not.

The provisional ballot changes were designed to “keep college students from voting,” Clemens, who served in the Florida House in 2011, said. College students helped boost Barack Obama to victory in 2008.

“The genesis of this language was discriminatory. It remains discriminatory,” Clemens said.

That drew a rebuke from Sen. Andy Gardiner, R-Orlando, who implied that the Democrats’ amendments were contrary to the Senate’s protocol.

“Your comments takes away from deliberative body that we are. We tend to do things a bit different,” Gardiner said.

Later, Latvala said the Democrats blind-sided him with their amendments, filed Friday, and should have reached out to him last week. “There were a couple of those that were in there today that if I’d seen them and we could have worked on them, we could have probably put them in,” he said.

He called the Democratic opposition to the bill a political ploy.

“It’s hard for me to understand how every Democrat in the House could vote for the bill. We improved a couple of areas in the Senate bill in the issues they’re concerned about and the Democrats voted against it. It’s just politics pure and simple,” Latvala said.

But Clemens said it was “naive” to expect the Democrats to support the measure without the changes they said were priorities.

The 2011 law “took us from Point A to Point Z and now they want to go back to Point M and say that it’s enough,” Clemens said. “It’s just simply not.”